Administrators are often needed to ensure the proper functioning and management of modern computing systems. To provide this administrative functionality, many enterprise and organizational data centers provide management console interfaces having a set of interface elements to display status information and/or to provide operational controls over various aspects of the computing system.
In large computing environments having multiple underlying systems that need to be managed, there may be any number of individual nodes/systems/clusters (which may collectively be referred to herein as a “node”), where each of these individual nodes/systems/clusters is managed by its own management console interface. Since the individual systems/clusters may differ from one another, it is possible that the management console interface will likewise be different as well. One cause of this is if the individual nodes/systems/clusters correspond to different computer/software/hardware products. Even if the systems correspond to the same product, it is possible that they relate to different versions of the product, and hence the management console interface will also differ in terms of its versioning—resulting in basic incompatibilities in terms of functionality, user interfaces, and APIs (application programming interfaces).
To efficiently manage the computing environment, it would be very helpful to allow administrators at a centralized management console to manage each of the individual nodes/systems/clusters. The problem is that, as noted above, some or all of the underlying systems within the computing environment may correspond to different types and/or versions of its management console interface.
To address this issue, one possible approach is to allow the administrator to use the user interface for the centralized management console to access and manage the pertinent functionality of each of the local nodes. However, the drawback with this approach is that, due to the different types and/or versions of the management console user interfaces, there may exist incompatibilities between the UI at the central node and the UI at the local nodes.
Another approach is to configure the central UI to include the required functionality of all of the local node UIs. The drawback with this approach is that the central UI very quickly becomes a nightmare to maintain, given that the central console code must be created to include all possible types and variants of the underlying local management UIs that it may ever need to emulate. In addition, bloating out the codebase for the centralized management console will likely cause diminished performance and greater latency for the user interface (e.g., due to a large number of conditional logic that must be put into place to handle the multitude of different underlying console options). Moreover, this approach is not forwards compatible, so that a compatibility problem may occur if an underlying system has a later version of management code as compared to the centralized management console.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach to implement a management infrastructure for computing environments.